Recognizing that tourism is a double-edged sword that could bring economic benefits to the Atayal community of Smangus, but could also wreak ecological damage, elders of the village in Hsinchu County’s Jianshi Township (尖石) have convened to discuss plans to limit the amount of visitors to the area to 200 to 250 per day.
According to Mu Masay, a young villager, residents hope that visitors can help the village protect the mountains and forests surrounding it, but are concerned that if too many tourists arrive, their everyday lives may be disturbed.
As the last Aboriginal village in the country to have electricity installed and be connected to the “outside” via government-built roads,” Smangus has aroused ever-rising interest as a travel destination since the discovery of large grove of ancient trees there in 1994.
Photo: Liao Hsueh-ju, Taipei Times
The rise in tourism has improved the village’s economy over time and in 2004, the government convinced 28 families — accounting for about 80 percent of the villagers — to agree to a system of “living and working together on communal land.”
Under this principle, the village has divvied up human resources into different types of work, such as labor and production, the managing of restaurants and hostels, as well as construction and agriculture, with the overall aim of sustaining its tourism industry.
Mu Masay, 29, was among the villagers who agreed with this concept.
Photo: Kan Chih-chi, Taipei Times
“The villagers worked to pave the roads because we wanted tourists to have a better path to walk on when they come to see the forest groves,” Mu Masay said.
“We carried in all of the building materials ourselves and when we the work had progressed far enough to make it inefficient to return to the village at night, we would often sleep on the ground at the work site and continue paving the next day,” he added.
Guides such as Mu Masay — of which there are about 50 — have to be ready to guide tourists into the woods and up the mountains at 6am every morning, with a round trip covering about 10km in total.
“We are also tasked with other jobs, such as preparing dinner in the evenings or cleaning up rooms in tourist lodgings to prepare it for the next customer,” Mu Masay said, adding that their workday usually ends at 10pm.
“In the off-season, we usually have one day off, but during vacations and holidays all of us work every day,” Mu Masay said, adding that their monthly pay is about NT$16,000.
During the holiday seasons, there can be up to 300 tourists staying in village lodgings, but this amount taxes Smangus’ manpower to the limit, Mu Masay said, adding that the highest number of lodgers they had received on one day was 500.
Mu Masay did not dwell too much on the low pay, adding that it was the same amount earned by villagers in other professions.
“It is our belief that our efforts will help the village develop better and in return, the village takes care of its residents, with subsidies for education, marriage, childbirth and medical needs coming from village funds,” Mu Masay said.
The only thing he expressed concern about was the maintenance of the environment.
“We have labored and sweated so that tourists can enjoy their time here, and we only hope that they appreciate our efforts and maintain our ecology and homes by not littering, or taking flowers and pieces of wood back home because they find them pretty,” Mu Masay said.
The conundrum of being reliant on tourism to benefit villagers, but constantly worried that the increasing volume of tourists will prove too stressful for the environment is an issue that Smangus hopes to solve soon.
Some non-governmental organizations have cited several programs as examples of how the village council can manage tourism in harmony with its ecological concerns.
One of the programs named as an example is the “Green Taiwan” ecological travel plan funded by the Citi Bank Taiwan Foundation and executed by the Chi Sing Eco-conservation Foundation, Under the program, Amis chefs were employed to improve the quality of the Aboriginal meals offered to tourists by the project, the organizations said.
By bettering their cooking techniques and changing key ingredients to wild herbs, the project’s meals became more expensive, but received more commendations from tourists, the organizations said.
The village council said it is mulling adjustments to lodgings, such as discontinuing four-person rooms and large rooms for groups or backpackers, and turning them into higher priced double-bed rooms. This measure would not only help control the amount of visitors, but it would also cut back on the amount of work the villagers have to do to maintain the rooms.
The village hopes to cut down the number of overnight tourists from 300 to 250 people a day over the course of five years, the council said.
The council is also considering repackaging the souvenirs it offers, which include fruit, peach wine, jam and handicrafts all made or grown in Smangus.
Villager Lahuy Icyeh said that Smangus lacks a systemic plan for the sale, packaging and marketing of its merchandise, adding however that it would continue seeking to learn what it needs to do to give visitors a better experience.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching